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SSL or HTTPS will Boost SEO Ranking?

SSL or HTTPS will boost SEO Ranking or is it also just a SEO myth? Well, before discussing about that, here I’m pasting an official announcement Google posted on August 06, 2014

Over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

So now you know Google do use HTTPS as a ranking signal. They mentioned “For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it”. They posted that announcement on August 2014 so maybe they now increased that 1% to something higher.

So Google said it and that means – Yes, HTTPS will give you an SEO boost.

Things you need to consider if switching to HTTPS

You maybe planning to add a SSL to your site. Google provided some basic tips if you are planning to add an SSL.

Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate

Use 2048-bit key certificates

Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain

Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains

Check out Site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address

Other Benefits of SSL/HTTPS

So it is clear that HTTPS will give you an SSL boost. What are the other benefits of adding an SSL certificate for your site?

More Privacy and Security

HTTPS will encrypt all the communications inside your website. That means URL’s, Site history, Credit card details and all other site data will be secured and it will stop man-in-the-middle attack.

More referrer data

If you go from a HTTPS or SSL enabled page to a normal HTTP page then you will lose all referrer data. Why because the SSL connection must be encrypted and it won’t pass the site details to the HTTP page. You can solve this problem by adding an SSL certificate.

Indexing HTTPS pages by default

Google recently updated their indexing system to look for more HTTPS pages. Google bots will be crawling HTTPS equivalents of HTTP pages, even when the former are not linked to from any page. When two URLs from the same domain appear to have the same content but are served over different protocol schemes, Googlebot will typically choose to index the HTTPS URL if:

It doesn’t contain insecure dependencies.

It isn’t blocked from crawling by robots.txt.

It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page.

It doesn’t have a rel=”canonical” link to the HTTP page.

It doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag.

It doesn’t have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs.

The sitemaps lists the HTTPS URL, or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL.

How to Order SSL and How Do I Install it?

SSL costs vary based on the SSL type purchased. You can purchase an ALPHASSL ssl certificate for $19.95 for 1 year in https://my.interserver.net under SSL -> Buy SSL.

Using alphassl note that the cert can be under https://domain.com OR https://name.domain.com, but NOT both.

DomainSSL, the next certificate type at 99.50 / year when ordered as https://name.domain.com also works at https://domain.com

An ALPHASSL wildcard is $75 per year. However for cPanel user’s be aware that cpanel does not yet fully support wildcard certificates. They can be installed but not as *.domain.com, instead choose install as name.domain.com.